A Name Change That George Orwell Could Have Dreamed Up

Take note Higher Ed Watch readers — it is no longer politically correct to call proprietary schools “career colleges.” From now on, they are to be referred to as “private-sector” colleges.

At least that’s the word that has come down from the lobbying organization formerly known as the Career College Association (CCA). On Wednesday, CCA officially changed its name to the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities (APSCU).

Yes, we know that this is an odd choice of names for an association that represents giant for-profit higher education companies that derive up to 90 percent of their revenue from U.S. taxpayers through the federal student aid programs. And that doesn’t even include the substantial amount of money some of these corporations are receiving in tuition assistance grants and GI bill benefits from the Departments of Defense and Veteran’s Affairs for providing on-line training programs to military personnel and veterans.

So does this name change portend a major shift in the association’s priorities – like, for instance, encouraging their members to reduce their dependence on federal subsidies? Not a chance.

In fact, judging from internal CCA strategy documents that Higher Ed Watch obtained this summer, the association appears only to be getting more aggressive in seeking out new sources of federal funding for their institutions.

Not only are the group’s leaders continuing to press Congress to eliminate, or at least further loosen, the “90-10 rule,” which prohibits for-profit colleges from receiving more than 90 percent of their revenue from the federal financial aid programs, but they also appear to be browbeating government agencies to allow their schools to dig deeper into the federal till.

But don’t take our word for it. Just take a look at the “Big Picture Legislative Goals” that CCA’s federal legislative committee highlighted during a strategy session at the association’s national convention in June. In order to achieve its top goal of ensuring the “equal treatment of proprietary institutions of higher education,” the panel recommended that CCA take the following actions:

1. Identify areas where proprietary schools are unfairly excluded by policymakers.


2. Continue advocating for sector representation in higher education decision-making bodies.


3. Continue to highlight areas where federal agencies are excluding the proprietary sector from opportunities without statutory authority and against policy goals.


4. Continue to demand in writing a legal and policy justification for not including proprietary sector. [Emphasis added here and above]

To be fair, we don’t know the extent to which the association has been making such demands. But this certainly isn’t the type of behavior one would expect from an organization that is trying so hard to tout its private-sector credentials.

At Higher Ed Watch, we’ve seen this game before. For years, the student loan industry and its supporters on Capitol Hill tried to portray the Federal Family Education Loan program as a private-sector program  —  despite the fact that the federal government set the terms of the loans while taxpayers insured private lenders against 100 percent of the interest rate risk, subsidized administrative costs, and covered all but a sliver of default losses on the loans. Remarkably, loan industry officials tried to continue this charade even after the credit crunch hit and the government was providing federal capital to lenders to make new loans.

Eventually policymakers caught on, and we all know what happened next.

CCA should pay heed to a key lesson from the student loan industry’s collapse. Saying that you are from the private sector doesn’t make it so, no matter how loudly or often you repeat it.